Highlife Saturday Night: Popular Music and Social Change in Urban Ghana

Notes

233 Introduction 1. For a list of nearly fifty advertised dances that took place in various cities that night, see Daily Graphic, March 2, 1957. 2. For more on the Ghana@50 celebrations see Carola Lentz and Jan Budniok, “Ghana@50—Celebrating the Nation: An Eyewitness Account from Accra,” Working Paper no. 83, Department of Anthropology and African Studies, University of Mainz, March 2007. Also see http://www.ghana50.gov.gh/events/index.php?op=anniversary. 3. Terence Ranger, Dance and Society in Eastern Africa, 1890–1970: The Beni Ngoma (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); John Miller Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility: Aesthetics and Social Action in African Musical Idioms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979); David Coplan, In Township Tonight!: South Africa’s Black City Music and Theatre (London: Longman, 1985); Thomas Turino, Nationalists, Cosmopolitans, and Popular Music in Zimbabwe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Kelly Askew, Performing the Nation: Swahili Music and Cultural Politics in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Marissa Moorman, Intonations: A Social History of Music and Nation in Luanda, Angola, from 1945 to Recent Times (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008); Bob W. White, Rumba Rules: The Politics of Dance Music in Mobutu’s Zaire (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008). 4. George Lipsitz asserts that while popular music is not history in and of itself, it “can be read historically, dialogically, and symptomatically to produce valuable evidence about change over time”: Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), vii–xxv. 5. In the pages that follow, I use the capitalized version of this conceptualization (Saturday Night) to distinguish it from the particular weekend occasion (Saturday night). 6. Felicia Kudiah, June 19, 2009. 7. Bill Freund, The African City: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 65–67; David M. Anderson and Richard Rathbone, “Urban Africa: Histories in the Making,” in Africa’s Urban Past, ed. David M. Anderson and Richard Rathbone (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2000), 8–9; Ghana, 1960 Population Census of Ghana, vol. 3: Demographic Characteristics (Accra: Census Office, 1964). 8. John Parker, Making the Town: Ga State and Society in Early Colonial Accra (Portsmouth : Heinemann, 2000); T. C. McCaskie, Asante Identities: History and Modernity in Notes 234 Notes to Pages 6–8 an African Village (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); S. S. Quarcoopome, “Urbanisation, land alienation, and politics in Accra,” University of Ghana Research Review 8, nos. 1 & 2 (1992): 40–54. 9. Frederick Cooper, “Urban Space, Industrial Time, and Wage Labor in Africa,” in Struggle for the City: Migrant Labor, Capital, and the State in Urban Africa, ed. Frederick Cooper (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1983), 7–50; Paul Maylam and Iain Edwards, ed., The People’s City: African Life in Twentieth-Century Durban (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1996); Andrew Burton, African Underclass: Urbanisation, Crime, and Colonial Order in Dar es Salaam (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005). 10. Richard Jeffries, Class, Power and Ideology in Ghana: The Railwaymen of Sekondi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Jeff Crisp, The Story of an African Working Class: Ghanaian Miners’ Struggles, 1870–1980 (London: Zed Books, 1984); David Kimble, A Political History of Ghana: The Rise of Gold Coast Nationalism, 1850–1928 (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1963); Raymond Dumett, El Dorado in West Africa: The Gold Mining Frontier, African Labor, and Colonial Capitalism in the Gold Coast, 1875–1900 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998). 11. In recent decades, available literature on leisure and popular culture has flourished . For a few important works, see Karin Barber, “Popular Arts in Africa,” African Studies Review 30, no. 3 (1987): 1–78, 104–11; Phyllis Martin, Leisure and Society in Colonial Brazzaville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Emmanuel Akyeampong , Drink, Power and Cultural Change: A Social History of Alcohol in Ghana, c. 1800 to Recent Times (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1996); Laura Fair, Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post-Abolition Zanzibar, 1890–1945 (Athens, Ohio University Press, 2001); Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, “The Creation and Consumption of Leisure: Theoretical and Methodological Considerations,” in Leisure in Urban Africa, ed. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza and Cassandra Rachel Veney (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2003), vii–xli. 12. Stephan F. Miescher, Making Men in Ghana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); Jean Allman and Victoria Tashjian, “I Will Not Eat Stone”: A Women’s History of Colonial Asante (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2000); Sjaak van der Geest, “õpanyin: The Ideal of Elder in the Akan Culture of Ghana,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 32, no. 3...